PERSISTENCE OF VISION

An exhibition at Techne Art Center

 

“What kind of work do you do?” It is a familiar question for an artist, but the answer is notalways simple. For the sake of brevity, an artist might call their work “realistic” or “abstract.” Neither word can capture what happens in the work—or what happens when someone spends time with it.

 

Persistence of Vision brings together works that are difficult to place within a single category.Here, abstraction is not a fixed style. It emerges through color, gesture, material, scale,distortion, or an unexpected relationship between forms. The exhibition looks beyond the first label that comes to mind and remains open to meanings that shift as we look.

 

Across painting, works on paper, ceramics, sculpture, and other materials, the artists create forms that catch and hold the eye in different ways. Each artist brings a distinct sense of perception to the exhibition—one that may swing from humor to a sense of dread, but always retaining a childlike sense of play. Some works draw us close with intricate marks, layered surfaces, and quiet details. Others seem to shift as we move around them, revealing new contours, colors, and relationships with every change of position.

 

Together, the works invite us to remain curious—to notice how perception can deepen over timeand what may emerge when we look again. A familiar shape may become strange; a seeminglychaotic surface can reveal its own careful rhythm. The exhibition challenges our preconceivednotions of what is real and what is imagined, asking us to consider how past experiences shapethe world we see—and how that world may differ from what we have assumed. Persistence ofVision questions the very nature of reality.

 

We’ll call this our “abstract show,” but only for lack of a better term.

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Chuck Thomas